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After midnight, one evening in late January, a doctor ushered a young man with a mangled hand into her car and sped to a private clinic on the outskirts of Tehran. She took back roads to avoid security checkpoints, where hulking officers were strip-searching passengers to look for injuries or any evidence of their participation in the uprising that had recently swept the country. Around 2 A.M., the doctor arrived safely at the clinic, where she slipped a glove over the man’s hand to hide his injury. Then she led him past reception, to a specialist who was waiting to receive him.

In late December, mass protests erupted across Iran, leading security forces to massacre thousands of people over the course of several days in January. Scores of wounded demonstrators were left scrambling for medical help. Many government-run hospitals began operating as an extension of the regime’s security forces, targeting anyone who dared to seek treatment. Some of the injured were detained in wards, sometimes while under anesthesia. Others were denied care altogether. Many didn’t make it as far as the hospital before they were detained. In response, medical professionals throughout the country have forged secret units to treat those injured in the assault.

During the demonstrations on January 8th, after snipers started firing at protesters, the doctor in Tehran, whom I will call Narges, followed a trail of blood into an apartment building, where an injured woman had taken cover. Narges, a general practitioner in her thirties, fashioned a tourniquet from a head scarf to save the woman’s leg from a bullet wound. “Within twenty-four hours, I went from treating flu patients to treating war injuries,” she told me. Her phone started ringing with calls for help from the relatives or friends of the wounded. She and a friend rallied a network of young doctors and began treating people in living rooms, kitchens, and restaurants.

Over the next few days, she stocked her backpack full of essentials, such as pain medication—supplied by friendly pharmacists—and scalpels, which she sanitized in ovens and on stovetops. She had no choice but to numb herself to the butchery, the likes of which she had never seen before: a fourteen-year-old boy with rail-thin legs that had been sprayed with metal pellets; a man with a tennis-ball-size hole in his calf that she helped sew shut. “It was hell,” she told me.

The dangers to people like Narges are clear. The Iranian regime, in addition to arresting protesters, has started targeting anyone who has attempted to help them. The clampdown is part of a broader campaign by the Iranian government to reassert control over its streets amid mounting threats of war from abroad. In recent weeks, President Trump has ordered a large buildup of forces, which he has called a “beautiful armada,” close to Iran’s shores, in preparation for an attack that he warned would “be far worse” than the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites last June. U.S. and Iranian officials held indirect discussions last Friday, in Oman, about how to de-escalate the crisis, and they are expected to continue negotiations.

Over the past several days, I spoke with a number of Iranian doctors, lawyers, and journalists, who described a campaign of quiet terror in the wake of the massacres. (For their safety and security, I have kept them anonymous, and will use pseudonyms to refer to them throughout the piece.) One thirtysomething filmmaker from Tehran said that the streets of his city had been “washed of blood, but were still dusted by death.” An activist sent me photographs that she had taken of rows of fresh graves, many marked by the same date, that continue to multiply on the outskirts of the capital. Some people told me that they were staying at home, hoarding water, generators, and dried food, in anticipation of an American bombardment. A man in Mashhad, a city in northeastern Iran where security forces massacred hundreds of protesters, said that he felt stuck between “waiting for war and preparing for prison.”

Arbitrary arrests and disappearances have increased, according to human-rights groups. “It’s a mafia-style cleanup operation,” Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert at Chatham House, a policy institute based in London, told me. She said that the regime “is trying to sanitize everything and restore law, order, and normalcy as quickly and as effectively as possible.” A source in Iran’s judicial system told me that due process in the courts appears nonexistent, leaving families with “little to no recourse.” The source said that they were receiving calls every day from parents who wanted to know if their missing children had appeared on execution lists. Their only advice to them, they said, is “to go to the court and beg for mercy.”

As the regime imposes a forced forgetting of the massacres in January, it has increasingly targeted medical workers, who have borne witness to some of the worst atrocities. Some have suffered assaults and interrogations, including Alireza Golchini, a surgeon in the northern city of Qazvin. On January 7th, he posted his phone number on Instagram, inviting injured Iranians to contact him for help. Days later, officers entered his home and beat him, before hauling him off to jail. (Golchini’s cousin told me that he is currently out on bail and awaiting trial.) Such arrests and surveillance have increased over the past few weeks, according to activists and doctors outside the country who have been tracking disappearances. One network told me that they had confirmed dozens of medical-worker arrests since the start of the demonstrations. The president of the Iranian Medical Council has said that seventeen health-care workers faced legal action in connection to the uprising, but he denied that they had been prosecuted for aiding demonstrators.

“The government is in a battle to control the narrative,” Saman Zia-Zarifi, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, a U.S.-based organization that documents attacks on medical workers, told me. “It knows how the truth emerges in the halls of hospitals.” The scope of the carnage has been widely obscured by an internet blackout enforced by the regime, which has admitted that more than three thousand people were killed in the unrest. Medical staff across the country have reported casualties from their wards to doctors and activists outside Iran, who have estimated that the real death toll is much higher.

The extent of the casualties will be difficult if not impossible to quantify, according to several doctors I spoke with, because the influx of cases far exceeded the capacity of many hospitals. Many patients were not admitted, and some who were admitted were not logged in hospital systems. The medical records that do exist have, in some cases, been tampered with or destroyed, either by security forces or hospital workers coöperating with the regime. Medical workers sympathetic to the uprising, meanwhile, have also changed the names and injuries listed on some patients’ medical charts, to protect their identities from authorities.

Medical workers have begun quietly doing their own record-keeping. One hospital employee in the northern city of Rasht told me that he had photographed hundreds of pieces of evidence, including CT scans and X-rays, from two emergency wards where he had volunteered during the massacre. “I want the world to know that these people existed, and that they have paid a price for their freedom,” the employee, who I will call Anush, told me. So far, he has collected records for nearly five hundred admitted patients, the majority of whom suffered trauma injuries. The images and scans, which he shared with me, compose an eerie tableau of the dystopian scenes that he witnessed in January: one X-ray showed a bullet that shattered the femur of a forty-seven-year-old mother, who had tried to shield her son from gunfire. One brain scan showed a metal pellet, which had partially blinded a nurse after she was shot in the head while exiting the hospital. “The wards felt like a war zone, run by regime thugs,” Anush said. Agents in plain clothes followed protesters into operating rooms, then detained them when they had completed their medical treatment. On several occasions, Anush said that he saw officers intervene during a surgical procedure, resulting in scuffles with medical staff. A medical intern was hospitalized after he was shot with metal pellets at close range.

He recalled a mother rushing into the ward to show surgeons and nurses a photograph on her phone of her missing son. Soon after she left, officers dragged in a corpse, which “had the face of that mother’s son,” Anush said. He recognized the man easily from the photo she had shown him. “His hands were bound and there was a bullet wound in his head.”

Once it became clear that the emergency wards themselves weren’t safe, “many colleagues started calling in sick—or not showing up for their shifts,” Anush said. He began volunteering at a privately owned clinic, which was filled with injured people. And yet word of the clinic’s existence soon reached security officers, who vandalized it and interrogated the doctor who ran it.

For many of the wounded, the threat of disappearing into Iran’s prisons far outweighs the risks of forgoing medical help. The problem has been especially grim in remote regions, where private clinics are scarce, and patients must travel long distances to get care. Volunteers have organized medical convoys and ferried patients across the country to safe operating rooms.

On a recent January evening, a team of volunteers set out to collect protesters from a city in northern Iran, where they were stranded in their homes with trauma wounds that they had sustained earlier that month. The protesters needed to be transferred to private hospitals, which were better equipped, and where specialists could operate on them. Several of the wounded had bullet holes in their legs or feet. One young woman, who had been struck in the eye by a rubber bullet, was at risk of going blind.

The convoy’s destination was another city, about two hundred miles away. Relatives of the injured drove ahead, in separate cars, and alerted the convoy to checkpoints or police who patrolled intersections along their route. “It was stressful,” one of the volunteers told me. “It was a long drive, and they had a lot of pain.” The driver, nicknamed Renas, tried to keep pace while avoiding potholes. He played music, and sang folk songs to “distract them from their fear—and from mine.” Five hours later, just before sunrise, he delivered the injured to another team of volunteers, who escorted them into safe houses before they could draw attention from police. “I was relieved,” Renas told me. But they did not arrive in time to save the young woman’s eye, which was removed by an ophthalmologist days later. “We are fighting with a wooden spoon,” he said, “against a government that is armed to the teeth.”

The group that organized the convoy was connected to a broader network of nurses, doctors, and volunteers, which had been coördinating dozens of surgeries for protesters marooned in their homes, in obscure corners of the country. One of the main organizers was a surgeon, whom I will call Karim. He had directed an undercover group of medical professionals since 2018, through several political uprisings. A few years ago, he was detained by security agents, after they discovered he was operating on demonstrators. Fear of imprisonment had not deterred him from reactivating his network in January, shortly after a gunman sprayed him with plastic pellets in Tehran. “I knew that I had to do something,” he said. “The brutality this time was different. These officers were shooting to finish a generation in the streets.”

Karim had treated patients in their homes, hospitals, and cafés across five cities. He shared CT scans he had stored on his phone of patients who died in surgery. He recalled one man whose neck had been sliced by a machete, severing both his carotid and vertebral arteries. “For every one I could not save, I see my own children,” Karim said. “I am in a battle for their future.” The cases he had encountered across the country haunted him, even more than the prospect of war.

Some feared that a foreign attack would give the regime more pretext to direct violence toward its own civilians, and to execute prisoners en masse. This would place even more of a strain on the medical community: many hospitals had already run out of blood and basic medications, Karim told me, leaving doctors unprepared for another influx of injuries. Yet he echoed the enthusiasm that I heard from many Iranians who welcomed foreign intervention. “We are already in a war with our own government—there has been so much death,” he said. “These people will take the hand of anyone offering to pull them from drowning. Literally anyone.” ♦

In February, a pop-up science column, Annals of Inquiry, is appearing in place of Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll. Chayka will return in March.

Forty years ago, Bill Weiss, a student at Columbia University, went to see James Galway, a virtuoso Irish flutist, perform at the 92nd Street Y. Weiss had recently earned an A in a required musical-humanities course, and he thought that at the show he might finally feel moved by great music—an experience that had, until then, evaded him. His seat was in the front row. “I got to see the look of intensity in his eyes,” Weiss told me. “I got to see every bead of sweat that was cascading down his face. I could see that he was completely at one with the music.” He waited to experience some comparable upwelling of emotion, but it never came. Although he could appreciate Galway’s talent and passion, he felt nothing.

People have relished music for so long that we have evidence, from forty thousand years ago, of humans making a flute-like instrument out of a vulture bone. We feel that even wordless music reflects our moods. Music lovers have gone so far as to assign feelings to the keys that songs are played in. Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a seventeenth-century French composer, called F minor “obscure and plaintive,” and Johann Mattheson, an eighteenth-century German composer, said that it “sometimes causes the listener to shudder with horror.” Mattheson believed that music literally mimicked emotions; in his telling, joy was an “expansion of our vital spirits,” and so joyful music had expansive intervals between notes.

None of this made any sense to Weiss. As a child, he took music lessons, but they felt mechanical, like painting by numbers. “I would play the notes, but I wasn’t expressing myself emotionally,” he said. He learned that major chords were considered happy and minor chords were considered sad, and that a screechy violin evokes scariness in movies. But these associations were purely intellectual. He was puzzled by friends who bought band T-shirts and obsessed over concerts. When he watched films—for example, “The Graduate,” released in 1967—the music established a historical context more than an emotional one. “What kind of movie would that be without the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack?” he said.

Only when Weiss was in his fifties did he start to understand what made him different. In 2014, he heard a radio piece about people who, like him, got no joy from music—a trait called musical anhedonia. A couple of years later, he reached out to Psyche Loui, a cognitive scientist and a musician at Northeastern University who was researching the brains of people who did and didn’t experience chills from music. He offered himself up as a case study. Loui had studied people with varying attitudes toward music, but she’d never met someone with no attitude at all. She tested Weiss for the condition that he’d heard about on the radio. (It is different from anhedonia, a struggle to experience pleasure in general that is associated with various mental-health conditions.)

People with lifelong musical anhedonia, which Weiss turned out to have, easily recognize music. They aren’t tone-deaf, and they don’t have trouble enjoying other activities. But songs do nothing for them. “If I never heard music again, it wouldn’t be a particularly big loss,” Weiss told me. Using an MRI scanner, Loui and several colleagues examined Weiss’s white matter—nerve fibres that connect different areas of the brain. Weiss had conspicuously little connectivity between circuits in his brain that are involved in auditory processing and in mediating rewards. (In fact, compared to forty-six people in a control group, he had the least white matter between the circuits in question.) In the people who regularly got chills while listening to music, Loui had found the opposite: there were above average nerve connections between these circuits.

When Weiss learned that he had musical anhedonia, he was relieved. The knowledge allowed him to “come out of the closet” about his relationship to music—or the lack thereof. But studies of musical anhedonia also had a broader significance. If scientists could explain why musical anhedonics are unmoved by music, they might be able to explain why music is moving in the first place.

The musicologist Leonard Meyer argued that music gets its power largely from the expectations that it arouses in listeners. In his classic 1956 book “Emotion and Meaning in Music,” Meyer writes about a repetitive melodic fragment in the opening of “March to the Gallows,” from Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” “We believe that the composer is not so illogical as to repeat the figure indefinitely.” The listener feels suspense as she waits expectantly for the music to change. “The greater the buildup of suspense, of tension, the greater the emotional release upon resolution,” Meyer wrote.

One of the first researchers to study musical anhedonia, Robert Zatorre, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University, knew how powerful that release could be. As a fifteen-year-old rock fan, Zatorre was inspired by the Doors and the Moody Blues to take organ lessons, and his teacher invited him to listen to a Bach performance. “This is magnificent,” Zatorre remembered thinking. “There was an emotional depth. I had chills.” When he became a scientist, he wanted to study the power of music using neuroscience instead of music theory.

In 2011, during a sabbatical in Spain, Zatorre met Josep Marco-Pallares, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona who studies how people respond to rewards. They worked with several collaborators to come up with the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, a survey that measures responses to music. (Loui and her colleagues used it in their experiment on Weiss.) After the team gave it to more than a thousand people online, they noticed something strange: two to three per cent of people had extremely low scores. They didn’t seek out music, share it with their friends, or go to concerts, except perhaps to socialize. Zatorre had read that, in rare cases of brain damage, people could lose their enjoyment of music. But these survey respondents were healthy, and, in the lab, they reported normal responses to a variety of activities: food, sex, video games. A reward—in this case, winning cash—increased their heart rates and activated their sweat glands. They had what the researchers called “specific musical anhedonia.” When listening to songs that others found stirring, their physiological metrics were “basically flat,” Marco-Pallares told me.

Back at Zatorre’s lab, in Montreal, his collaborators imaged the brains of music lovers and found that the striatum—part of a network in the brain that releases dopamine during pleasurable activities—was deeply engaged, and seemingly in concert with the brain’s auditory circuits, which help perceive and analyze sounds. That finding helped Zatorre develop a theory. To have an emotional musical experience, he proposed, you must have an interaction between the reward system and the auditory circuits. Brain imaging affirmed this idea: A 2016 fMRI study found that, in musical anhedonics, music produced below-average activation in reward areas, but gambling tasks did not. Musical anhedonics also had fewer connections between the auditory circuits and the striatum. In contrast, people who showed strong emotional responses to music had more connections.

In 2018, Zatorre showed just how much one’s enjoyment of music depends on the reward system. He and a team asked seventeen people to listen to their favorite songs, and to ten other songs that the researchers chose, while his team used noninvasive brain stimulation to increase activity in the striatum. Remarkably, the stimulation seemed to make songs more impactful and enjoyable. (When participants were given the chance to buy the new music they’d heard, they offered more money for songs that they had heard during the stimulation.) In other experiments, Zatorre found that bolstering dopamine enhanced the enjoyment of music, while blocking dopamine reduced it.

The importance of our reward system in musical enjoyment was something of a surprise, Zatorre told me. Animals are thought to have developed reward systems so that they’d be driven to eat and procreate, and thus to survive. Zatorre’s team had demonstrated that music takes advantage of the same circuits that drive those more basic urges.

Studies like Zatorre’s have also given neuroscientific credence to Meyer’s theory of music and expectation, according to Amy Belfi, a music-cognition researcher at Missouri University of Science and Technology who was not involved in his research. “The idea that music is pleasurable because of its predictive qualities (inducing expectations) is pretty much unequivocally accepted in the field,” she told me in an e-mail. Neuroscience was offering a possible explanation for why. Pleasure isn’t the only thing that triggers the reward system; the expectation of pleasure triggers it, too. If scientists turn on a light every time they feed laboratory rats, the rats start experiencing dopamine spikes in response to the light alone.

Zatorre now thinks of music as a dance with expectation. I asked him if this might be why, in E.D.M. songs, the buildup before a “beat drop” is so exciting. It’s a perfect example of an expectation that’s first denied and then satisfied, he told me. “You’re in suspense,” he said. “You’re floating in the air, waiting for this beat to come back. . . . That’s what I was waiting for.”

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with my friend Timo Andres, a composer and a pianist in New York. At one point, he remarked that many people could learn to enjoy music more if they were taught “how to listen.” After dinner, I texted him to ask what he’d meant, and whether he saw himself as dancing with expectations. “I do agree that much of the pleasure we derive from music comes from our expectations being either fulfilled or confounded,” he wrote back. “This can happen on a macro level (the overall form of a song or symphony) but applies equally on the most micro level; we might find a melody particularly beautiful because of the one note or interval in it that escapes its pattern.”

Training can help a person expect certain patterns, Andres added, which underscores when conventions are being followed or flouted. “The most rewarding music, to me, is that which is quite intentionally complex on some levels and simple on others; that is, it has a foreground and a background,” he said. “Stray too far to either extreme and the music starts to feel a bit two-dimensional.” (His intuitions echoed one of Zatorre’s experiments, which suggested that listeners prefer songs that are neither too predictable nor too unpredictable.)

Over the years, Bill Weiss has continued to try out the occasional concert. Years ago, he went to a performance of Handel’s “Messiah.” It sounded to me like he could recognize the two-dimensionality that Andres had described to me. He just didn’t find it rewarding. “I did it more to check it off my bucket list than to say, ‘I’m going to have this joyous musical response,’ ” he said. He still feels confused when he sees strangers dancing to music—for example, when a cashier dances to the beat of whatever’s playing in a grocery store. “It always takes me aback, and just amazes me, because that thought would never, ever have entered my mind,” he told me. Still, his wife played music at their wedding. (They have a son who also seems indifferent to music.)

But Weiss was quick to mention other things that do give him pleasure. “I love walking around cities, admiring architecture,” he said. “I am kind of a foodie.” The chills that some people get from music, he’s felt while reading. He also has an unusually strong connection to visual art. When we spoke, over Zoom, he showed me an image of one of his favorite paintings: an early-seventeenth-century portrait by Peter Paul Rubens, of the artist’s young daughter Clara Serena. Her wispy blond hair filled my screen; her big blue eyes stared out at me.

“Not only has he made her come alive, but somehow, miraculously . . . just with pigment and canvas, he’s been able to depict love,” Weiss said. “It is so clear to me that he absolutely adored this child. And, knowing that she died at the age of twelve—around seven years after this was painted—I think Rubens must have been absolutely devastated.” I was moved.

A few days later, I happened to visit an exhibition called “Art of Noise,” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. On the first floor was a “shrine to music.” Listeners were invited to sit on cloth meditation chairs, facing a custom-built audio system designed by the artist Devon Turnbull.

I sat in the third row and closed my eyes. The introduction of an 1880 composition by Max Bruch, “Scottish Fantasy” in E-flat major, played through the speakers. It started gradually, with recurring slow notes followed by an outpouring of string instruments. For me, these wordless noises were clearly about sadness and longing. Maybe it was the gloomy weather outside, the fact that I was missing someone that day, or the way that the melody played with my expectations, but I was moved again.

Sometimes people tell Weiss that they feel bad for him, and that he is missing out on the rewards that music has to offer. In our conversations, though, he seemed untroubled. Listening to the music, I thought about Rubens’s daughter, and about how strongly and sincerely Weiss had responded to her portrait. “I’ve proved I don’t need music to feel alive,” he told me. “I find my rhythm elsewhere.” ♦

If you are considered attractive in middle age, it simply means that you look young.

Conversely, if you are considered attractive in middle school, it simply means that you look old.

If you are an attractive high-school student, have fun out there. But understand that, when you become an adult, nobody is going to like you.

You are a hundred years old and people still tell you how attractive you are? It’s genuinely heartwarming and, quite frankly, touching that you don’t realize you’re being condescended to.

Aren’t you an attractive dog! Every day of your life, people just come up to you and inform you of your beauty, right to your face. Isn’t that right? Who’s the pretty doggy? Yes, you are! Oh, you like getting scratched behind your ears, don’t you?

If you are portraying the wacky sidekick in a Hollywood movie but are still viewed as attractive, then you have badly misunderstood your job description. Report to wardrobe immediately to get your eccentric haircut and “Who Farted?” T-shirt.

However, if you look attractive while wearing a “Who Farted?” T-shirt, may I get your number?

Although you qualify as an attractive insect, you, Ms. Ladybug, are still likely to get squished. But take solace in the fact that, unlike your less comely bug brethren, the person doing the squishing will undoubtedly feel some amount of guilt and, perhaps, mutter an apology as they are murdering you.

Are you an attractive great-grandfather? Then you are Mick Jagger. Congratulations on that fact alone. I don’t understand the math of your whole “great-grandfather” thing, but, somehow, that is the reality of your familial situation. Yet you look so spry and handsome, and not just when you’re standing next to Keith! Well, I’m a huge fan. And please send my regards to Satan.

If you are deemed attractive while sitting on the toilet, call the police. You are being spied on by a pervert. It might be time to plaster over the peephole in your bathroom wall.

If you have a facial tattoo and are found attractive, you may have one of those hyperrealistic facial tattoos that depict the life-size visage of Ryan Gosling laid over your entire face, and you have been mistaken for Ryan Gosling.

If you are an attractive priest, understand that people are going to have questions.

Hello, attractive nun! Can you please sing that “Do-Re-Mi” song? Everybody loves that one.

If you appear attractive immediately after going through a gruelling six-hour surgery, you are a surgeon—and you maybe don’t take your job seriously enough?

When you audibly state that you are attractive while gazing into a mirror, you are suddenly rendered incredibly unattractive, even if you have one of those to-scale Ryan Gosling facial tattoos and a flattering, tight-fitting “Who Farted?” T-shirt.

If you are an attractive piece of furniture, annoying aesthete types may declare you “sexy.” But do not be persuaded to go to bed with them—unless you are a bed. ♦

The Iraqi film “The President’s Cake” is a great new entry in the vital cinematic tradition exemplified by Italian neorealism. At and after the end of the Second World War, Italian filmmakers responded with a new freedom to the traumas of Fascism and German Occupation as well as to the crises of American intervention amid Italy’s efforts to rebuild physically, politically, and morally. “The President’s Cake,” written and directed by Hasan Hadi, is one of the few recent films I’ve seen that fulfills a similar mission in a country similarly devastated by autocracy and war. Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

Like many of the essential neorealist films (such as “Paisan” and “Shoeshine”), “The President’s Cake” is intently focussed on catastrophic poverty issuing from war. It’s centered on the plights of children unmoored from overwhelmed or absent families, and it’s keenly attentive to the emotional and practical havoc wrought by a ruthless dictator. The movie is set in the span of a few days, in April, 1990, a period that Hadi appears to treat as a composite, folding in the harrowing results of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, in August of that year, which prompted U.N.-imposed sanctions and U.S.-led bombing raids. Even in the best of times, the film’s main characters weren’t prosperous. The protagonist is a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who lives with her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), in a mudhif, a house of twisted reeds, in Iraq’s southern marshlands. Lamia is an exceptional student, top of the class, but to get to school she, like many others in the region, must punt across a marsh. Some kids are ferried by a parent or guardian; Lamia transports herself.

Her grandma (Bibi, in Iraqi Arabic) is a farm worker who, on the morning of April 26th, two days before President Saddam Hussein’s birthday, is abruptly fired—involuntarily retired—by the landlord whose property she tills. She and Lamia thus turn instantly from poor to destitute. The timing couldn’t be worse, because, later that very day, Lamia is randomly chosen in school for a great honor that’s also a grave responsibility: to bake a birthday cake for Hussein, as is done in all schools throughout the country. Bibi can’t afford even the basic ingredients—eggs, flour, sugar, baking powder—but failure to bring the cake would be a severely punishable political offense. So, the next day, Bibi packs salable possessions—a radio, a pocket watch, some plates, some tchotchkes—and, with Lamia (and the girl’s pet rooster) in tow, hitches a ride with a postman named Jasim (Rahim AlHaj) to a nearby city, where they make the rounds of street merchants and try to come up with the money.

In the city, the story splits in half: Lamia gets separated from Bibi (for reasons I wouldn’t dare disclose) and searches for the one person she knows there, a classmate’s father, who supposedly works at an amusement park. At the venue, she espies the classmate, a boy named Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), picking someone’s pocket. When the police give chase, Lamia runs off with him. The rest of the film is a classic double adventure—Lamia and Saeed, now a team, take perilous risks to procure the needed ingredients for the cake, while Bibi desperately looks for Lamia.

Throughout, Hadi calls attention to the brutality that’s endemic in Iraqi daily life under a dictatorship. The ubiquitous portraits of Hussein—in classrooms and offices, in restaurants and stores, as freestanding steles and on public murals—match the reign of terror that he conducts. When Saeed visits Lamia at home, he wonders whether the President actually eats all the cakes, and Lamia hushes him: “Walls have ears.” The children’s classroom is run by a teacher who declares himself a soldier; each school day begins with the students’ mandatory fervent martial pledge to sacrifice body and soul for Hussein, and the teacher reminds the class that another classmate, who failed to honor the President’s birthday, was “dragged like a dog” along with his family.

But the most prominent form of daily brutality is economic deprivation, owing in large measure to the U.N. sanctions. The movie opens with marshland residents, including Lamia and Bibi, lining up far back and pressing urgently forward, jerricans in hand, to receive fresh water at a tanker truck from officials offering it as a gift from Hussein. Later, in the city, people similarly crowd into a store, waving bills frantically as if at an auction, as they clamor for flour. Taking advantage of such desperation, the more fortunate become predators: male merchants use food as lures for sex—even targeting Lamia. Navigating the city alone, she is forced into risky survivalism, perilously hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a bus for which she can’t afford the fare. Though revolted by theft, she ends up stealing. The country runs on bribes, whether at an imposing military checkpoint, at a police station, or at a hospital (even though, in the scene in question, the needed medicine is unavailable because of sanctions).

It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper. When things go sour, both kids spew insults and indignation with a matter-of-fact insolence. At moments of exceptional gravity, they play a staring contest that fills the screen with an ingenuous romanticism. The bonds of the children, Bibi, the postman, and a very few others in their circle endow “The President’s Cake” with a grandly humanistic warmth that’s all the stronger for the mighty pressure under which it’s forged.

What carries the drama toward sublimity, though, is Hadi’s way with the physical world and his characters’ place in it. His camera eye (thanks to cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru) is avidly alert to texture and makes visual patterns seem urgently tactile. In this regard, Hadi’s film reminds me of masterworks of the American director Joseph Losey (such as “Eva”and “These Are the Damned”), in which material surroundings rivalled behavior in expressing characters’ inner lives. “The President’s Cake” is adorned, embossed, scarred, and exalted with what gives daily life its literal feelings. The curves and twists of the reeds with which Lamia’s and Saeed’s homes are made; the angularities of modernist concrete walkways; the raw edges of bricks in the walls of a long alley; the rich jumble of foods that fill teeming markets; an arcades’ graceful arches; the exacting tile work on a mosque—all carry the mark of labor, forethought, and love. Hadi’s exceptional attention gives cinematic identity to collective artisanal energy, to the life force of care and devotion that stands outside the agonies of politics, to the spirit that endures a regime and outlives it. ♦

In April of 2023, when I was fresh out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy, I was hired as the nonfiction critic at the newly revived books section of the Washington Post. The shock to my system was immediate. In graduate school, where I studied aesthetics and German philosophy, I seldom came into contact with anyone who did anything else; even a brush with a classicist or the occasional stray Cartesian felt like something of a transgression. But the Post, it turned out, was much less siloed than the university. On my first day, I discovered that Books was seated next to Food. I broke a sweat scrambling eggs, and here, next to me, was a woman explaining patiently over the phone, “You don’t need to tell the readers which kind of chicken breast to use. They can choose organic if they want to.” A couple of days later, I overheard a heated discussion about salting pasta water. I hadn’t known that I cared about salting pasta water, but, in the course of my prurient listening, I found that I did, or at least that I cared that other people cared.

I like to think that some of the readers of my late section, Book World, made the same sort of leap. Maybe they hadn’t expected to be waylaid by a book review when they opened the paper to read about Donald Trump’s latest indiscretion or to check the score of a Capitals game; maybe they didn’t seek out literary criticism because they didn’t realize they liked it, or didn’t even know what it was. But they subscribed to a general-interest newspaper, so they happened upon its books coverage occasionally—and, sometimes, they stopped to read it.

In the three years that I worked at the Post, I fielded mail from all manner of people—doctors, teachers, prison inmates, and, not infrequently, Ralph Nader—about reviews I had written of everything from Senator Josh Hawley’s book about masculinity to the letters of Gustave Flaubert. Readers wrote from the D.C. suburbs and the Netherlands, from Arizona and New York. What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed.

From now on, the Post will no longer accommodate the admirably omnivorous avidity of its best readers. Visitors to its home page will no longer come across unforeseen book reviews, or really much writing about the arts at all. Last week, the paper fired close to half of the staff who remained after a previous round of layoffs, gutting its local and international desks, decimating its sports and arts coverage, and eliminating Book World altogether. No one who has anything to do with books remains employed at the paper, although I am told that the opinion section (exhorted last year to cheerlead for “personal liberties and free markets,” and Trumpism along with them) will run the occasional facsimile of a review. The Associated Press stopped publishing book reviews last fall; the Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing.

There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like The Drift and The Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.

Unlike the specialized literary magazine and its informal cousin, the literary blog, the general-interest newspaper has a kind of noble rapacity, an encyclopedic ambition to wrap its arms around the whole of the world. The Times insists that it strains to publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” and the Washington Post’s own principles, written by Eugene Meyer in 1935, when he became the paper’s publisher, proclaim that it “shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.” (They also promise that “the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good,” something that the paper’s present owner appears to have forgotten, if he ever knew it.) Whether the Times and the Post live up to their own standards in any given instance, or whether any newspaper can, there is an important difference between the completist ideal and a niche one, between “ALL the truth” and the truncated truth that a reader has already demonstrated she is willing to pay for—or, worse, the thin sliver of half-truth that her algorithm feeds her, mirroring her own existing tastes in a dismal mise en abyme.

A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public.

It is true, of course, that the public is only a useful fiction. No one has ever seen one in the wild. Some readers refuse to join one, stubbornly persisting in flipping to one section and ignoring the rest. But even if no newspaper can succeed entirely in cultivating the public that it imagines, it can still succeed to a greater or lesser degree—and Book World did succeed. Philistines are always declaring that no one reads literary criticism, but the record shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of book reviews. When the San Francisco Chronicle axed its stand-alone books section, in 2001, the paper’s editors were overwhelmed by an ensuing crush of vitriolic mail. “The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper,” one senior editor told Salon. If the outlet’s executive editor had “anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section, he wouldn’t have done it.” Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving step of never learning how to check the data myself, my editor told me that traffic increased in 2023 and 2024, even as the number of visitors to other sections of the paper was stagnating. Our clicks dropped off only after Jeff Bezos’s initial New York Post-ification of the opinion section, when he spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the paper to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

But to defend books coverage in these craven terms is already to concede too much. Popularity is not always a measure of merit, and, in any case, it is not static. What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as “readers” but as “consumers.” A consumer is a person whose preëxisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise.

In his own robotic recitation over the weekend, Bezos explained his logic for the cuts, such as it is. “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,” he said. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” The prospect of a paper that flatters its readers by regurgitating what they already click is familiar and depressing. It puts me in mind of Bezos’s other marquee product, another service that dealt a disastrous blow to books. On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all? ♦